Real-Time Processing of High-Resolution Video and 3D Model-Based Tracking for Remote Towers

Abstract

During the past decade, a new approach to providing air traffic services to airports from a remote location has been established, known as remote or digital tower. High quality video data is a core component in remote tower operations as it inherently contains a huge amount of information on which a controller can base decisions. The total resolution of a typical remote tower setup often exceeds 25 million RGB pixels and is captured at 30 frames per second or more. It is thus a challenge to efficiently process all the data in such a way as to provide relevant real-time enhancements to the controller. In this paper we describe the development of number of improvements and discuss how they can be implemented efficiently on a single workstation by decoupling processes, implementing attention mechanisms and utilizing hardware for parallel computing.